Reviving the historic role of public higher education in advancing social democracy
Modern social-democratic theory accepts the idea that the dynamics of market economies can generate increases in productivity and economic growth. The job of the social democrat would then be to ensure that working families share in the fruit of that growth and that those not able to work are protected through welfare programs and social insurance.
Our previous posts have addressed challenges to this ideal in light of the economic stagnation that advanced democracies have been experiencing since the 1970s. We follow Robert Gordon in calling it supply-side secular stagnation (see here). Productivity growth and long-term investment have been weak and the real wages of the majority of working families across the advanced sector have flatlined and even declined for the lowest-income wage earners.
The promising productivity boost driven by the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution of the 1990s delivered far less growth than hoped for and its impact was narrower, centered on the professional class and those working in the knowledge economy (see here).
The ability of social-democratic political parties to deliver on their historical promise has been further impacted by the Great Recession, rising inequality, and the aging of populations across the advanced sector. Globalization, a sharp decline in trade union strength, and the growth of the service sector and “gig” economies have made it that much more difficult for social democrats to convince their natural working and middle-class constituents to vote for them. Wage earners are moving in large numbers toward illiberal populist parties in nearly all countries. The miserable performance of the parti socialiste in the recent French presidential election (1.75% of the vote), despite holding the presidency as recently as 2016, and the recent elevation of a right-wing populist, Giorgia Meloni, to become the prime minister of Italy, are stark examples of this trend.
We argue that, to revive social democracy, social-democrats must shift away from passive acquiescence to “Third Way” alignment with neoliberal thinking and toward direct and immediate public investments into the material needs and living standards of working families, investments like those that helped advance social democracy for 30 years after WWII.
We have previously discussed the critical need to build millions of affordable and sustainable housing units along with associated transport, utilities, and services infrastructure (see here and here). We have also pointed to the need to strengthen the caring economy by creating millions of well-paid jobs to provide child-care, pre-K education, and especially elder care for the rapidly aging boomer generation (see here). And all this on top of the urgent need to transition to a low-carbon economy and adapt to changing environmental conditions.
In this post, we consider the role public higher education needs to play in such a revival.
The historical role of public higher education
One of the great accomplishments of social democracy in the 19th and early 20th Centuries was to ensure in most nations, in law, that children received a free public education through secondary school. This not only provided the minimum basis for creating the skilled workforce needed to support the emerging industrial economy; it also taught children the civic values needed to counteract the destructive aspects of the relentless capitalist drive for profits, values like democracy and universal suffrage, tolerance, human and civil rights, and a justice system based on fairness and the rule of law.
Public higher education traveled along a similar trajectory as it superseded the traditional teaching of theology and the liberal arts to the sons of the propertied and wealthy at private colleges. Higher education was needed to meet the demands of a modern industrial economy and the technical requirements of a modern citizens’ military.
The École Polytechnique in France, a product of the 1789 Revolution, became a model for Western nations in this regard. Built and staffed by republican scientists and engineers, the École centered a French national system of colleges and programs addressing mining, agriculture, transport infrastructure, medicine, military technology, teacher training, and many other areas of public interest.
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, established in 1802, adopted many École features and became the first engineering college in the U.S. Engineers trained at West Point engaged in a number of important national infrastructure projects in the early 1800s, including carrying out the surveys needed for constructing roads, canals, and the trans-continental railroads. They formed the basis for the Army Corps of Engineers which supports both military and non-military infrastructure development.
In Prussia, the Berlin University became another center for advancing research and the practical arts and sciences. It challenged the prevailing aristocratic institutions and introduced programs in science and engineering. These were stimulated by, and contributed to, the movement that effected the unification of principalities that created modern Germany.
The rapid development of industry in the UK in the 19th Century led to the creation of major engineering and scientific research programs at public universities in Glasgow, Manchester, and London. Even Cambridge and Oxford, as public universities, expanded their offerings in science, engineering, and technology and became international leaders in scientific research.
In all these nations, mercantilism and nationalism served, at that time, as positive economic and political driving forces behind creating these publicly-sponsored institutions.
The U.S. “land grant” program helped build an economic superpower
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act into law. The Act granted 30,000 acres of federal land per congressmember to every state and territory. The land could be sold and used to establish and endow a university whose primary purposes were to teach the practical arts and sciences to young and older members of working families, support local and regional economies, and conduct research into agricultural science, mechanics, engineering, military science and other subjects that promoted state, local, and national progress.
The 1862 Act allocated over 11 million acres to states and grew to encompass all states and territories. Later legislation strengthened the research mission and added land-grant status and funding for colleges on tribal lands and for historically black colleges. States helped define the specific mission and goals of these institutions, based on regional needs, and contributed to the costs. Many states also opted to establish hospitals on state university campuses.
The early years of the program saw little concrete progress largely because the public K-12 system was barely underway, but today’s public state universities and their branches and cooperative extensions are the fruit of this revolutionary program. Public universities grew strong in the 20th Century and many consider them major contributors to the emergence of the U.S. as an economic power in the 20th Century.
Interestingly, while land-grant universities were expected to support agricultural and industrial progress, they were also expected to offer courses and programs in traditional liberal arts and sciences. Educational leaders saw the importance of teaching enlightenment values through a modern liberal education. The new focus was on expanding, not replacing, the curriculum being offered at private institutions. They became comprehensive universities many of which are highly ranked, nationally and internationally. While Japanese higher education is largely private, their top-level research universities are also public and comprehensive. They borrowed heavily from Western institutions.
Community colleges
While European and American public research universities grew rapidly and became engines of scientific and technological research, innovation, and development across the advanced sector, it had become clear by the early 20th Century that there was also a need for stronger workforce education and skills training beyond secondary school. Governments began investing in “terminal” postsecondary vocational education, offering certificate and two-year degree programs that taught technical skills needed by businesses, health facilities, services, manufacturing, etc.. Variously called junior colleges, community colleges, tertiary institutions, polytechnic institutes, and technika (technical colleges), with typically no or low tuition, their growth over the course of the 20th Century was dramatic. Soldiers were attracted to these institutions in large numbers after WWII and governments encouraged the trend through programs like the American GI Bill.
The mission of community colleges aligned with that of public universities. In addition to training new nurses, technicians, bookkeepers, clerks, and assistants, these institutions provided adult programs, often at night, for unemployed workers and those in declining industries. With distinctly local and regional characteristics, they also became centers for continuing community and civic education, and health and social services.
Erosion of the core mission of public universities
While public universities continue to be centers of scientific discovery and technological innovation, neoliberal and Third Way policies have impacted these institutions, eroding their social-democratic public service mission. Most importantly, instead of addressing the material needs of working and middle-class families, they have prioritized the narrowly-defined knowledge economy. Business and information technology majors and graduate schools have grown spectacularly over recent decades and have become the most popular areas of study.
Research has also skewed heavily toward applied work in information technology and computer science, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics, and bioinformatics. Such research benefits the business world and also governments themselves through the value it provides to defense, intelligence, energy, and biomedical research agencies and the skills it provides to government administrative employees. These programs bring in a great deal of private funding from wealthy entrepreneurs, info-tech companies, and the pharmaceutical industry as well as high-performing foreign students who typically pay higher tuition and often become valued employees in these same companies.
To keep such programs relevant, many universities have created special contract faculty positions to bring in business and industry professionals to teach the most up-to-date material.
As public universities became deeply embedded in the knowledge economy and linked to large, corporations, they have been quietly weakening their commitment to supporting the material economy and meeting local and regional social and workforce needs.
Anti-growth ideology and radical environmentalism
There are other reasons for the shift in mission. Social democrats have historically supported regulations that improved job safety, food safety, drug safety, clean air, soil, and water, and many other areas of public concern that corporations often neglected in their quest to outperform competitors and generate shareholder profit.
In the later decades of the 20th Century, however, concern for safety and the environment created movements that challenge the very idea of economic growth as a public good. Anti-growth, anti-business, and anti-consumerism sentiment has grown rapidly in academia, the professional classes, and the urban intellectual elite, and liberal political parties that encourage this sentiment have seen their electoral support grow. In the EU, for example, Green political parties have gone from being marginal protest parties to exercising strong influence in governing coalitions.
The climate crisis has obviously played a significant role in this trend, but social-democratic parties have amplified the trend in their quest for votes from urban and suburban moderates, liberals, and libertarians, at the expense of their historical support from the working classes.
The narrow focus on the knowledge economy and the rise in faculty anti-growth sentiment have weakened the core teaching and research missions of public colleges and universities.
Social democrats must insist that public universities and community colleges address the material economy and the living standards of working and middle-class families
It’s a truism to say that higher education institutions will orient toward industries that provide employment opportunities for graduates. They will also orient to private sources of research funding for their faculty, many of whom have secured patents and created business start-ups. Biotechnology and drug development, for example, are major areas where university research has played a prominent role in advancing industry. Universities are also happy to use private donations to advance research into artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and other knowledge economy frontier areas.
Yet, as important as this kind of research may be, it does not directly address the needs of the many millions working in the material economy and especially in older, declining industrial towns and neighborhoods. These workers are the ones experiencing the worst impacts of economic stagnation and suffering elevated social distress. Young people in these areas are leaving for opportunities in dynamic metropolitan centers while those left behind are experiencing high rates of drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and suicide. Nothing is “trickling down” to them and social democrats should not neglect them.
The yellow vest demonstrations in France are a prominent example of how workers are responding to this neglect as is the collapse of the British Labour Party’s “Red Wall” support in the older central and northern England industrial cities and towns. Red state-Blue state polarization in the U.S. involves a similar dynamic as the pseudo-populist Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, has taken advantage of worker resentment in rural communities and declining factory and mining towns. Victor Orban in Hungary, Marine LePen in France, and Meloni in Italy have also adopted superficial pro-worker personas, much as Mussolini did when he claimed to be a socialist as he rose to power.
Many millions dwell in the cities, towns, and urban neighborhoods experiencing economic stagnation and decline and it is clear that markets alone cannot provide lasting solutions. The private sector has little interest in providing the kind of sustained long-term investment needed to turn these communities around, but there are ways that governments can provide a path forward.
National governments and the EU must set and fund new priorities
Rebuilding Europe and Japan after World War II forced national governments to launch major reconstruction projects and expand social insurance and welfare programs. With the private sector unable or unwilling to respond to many of today’s urgent priorities, it is once again necessary for national governments to use their sovereign powers to drive solutions, bringing the private sector along with them. Working in the public interest, national laboratories and public colleges and universities must be mobilized to design these solutions and provide the skills training needed to carry them out.
Here are some priority areas in the material economy that urgently need to be addressed along with suggestions as to how public colleges and universities can be involved.
Priority: Affordable housing
The advanced sector has made little progress in solving its affordable housing crises and recent large-scale investments into general infrastructure have largely ignored the problem. Governments have had little success getting the real estate industry to make more than a token commitment to building affordable units and suburban NIMBYism has proven to be a greater problem than expected especially as it transcends political divisions. There are also few research programs at national labs or public universities looking at possible comprehensive solutions.
In addition, it’s not just a question of building new units. As we have pointed out in previous posts, housing is the anchor for a host of infrastructure elements that define local communities, from transport, utilities, and water systems to access to health care, schools, recreational facilities, and green spaces.
Where one builds is therefore a crucial factor. A central feature of the crisis relates to how workers are increasingly trapped in urban jobs while facing unaffordable housing and utility costs. They can’t just pick up and move to remote communities and expect to find jobs. Instead they either spend an unacceptable portion of their income on housing and utilities, double up with others, or move to more dilapidated and segregated neighborhoods nearby.
If they are to move beyond city limits, therefore, their commuter transport must be considered, especially given that current suburban light rail commuter systems largely serve those communities most resistant to high-volume, multi-family residential construction.
The method of construction must also be considered as only manufactured housing can produce enough new units fast enough and at a low enough cost, especially since new units will need to be energy efficient, fire and pest resistant, and equipped with the kind of high-tech universal core that can provide easy and affordable access to internet and cable services.
Any manufacturing strategy will also need to offer potential tenants and buyers a sufficient variety of structural options and aesthetic designs to satisfy individuals, young couples with children, families with teenagers, and retirees. Today’s housing consumers, at any income level, will not accept the monolithic public housing that dominated federal public projects in the 1950s and 60s, the ones that locked in segregation, suffered rapid deterioration, and were ultimately razed just a few decades later.
The crisis will only worsen if political gridlock continues, austerity budgets dominate, and the housing stock in major metropolitan centers continues to age. Solutions will need to involve the following national commitments:
Federal land near urban centers and targeted smaller cities and towns will need to be allocated for housing development and the construction of transport and other infrastructure, as needed. This will bypass NIMBYism and other forms of resistance.
Sustainable long-term financing through public infrastructure banks or other mechanisms will be needed to provide the basis for comprehensive, long-term projects.
National labs and regional public university architecture and engineering teams must be formed to design the new projects and the manufacturing facilities needed to build them at scale.
Local state and community colleges will need to train the technicians, transport workers, assistants, managers, and administrative support workers needed to carry out the new projects and to maintain them once completed.
Priority: Low-carbon infrastructure
While national industrial policies across the advanced sector are funding research and development in alternative energy sources, electric grid expansion and improvements, and battery and EV technology, there has not been sufficient attention paid to how localities and businesses can reduce CO2 emissions and adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Public state universities and local community and technical colleges should be engaged in planning and implementing infrastructure projects that, among other things, replace oil burners with gas or heat pump technology, retrofit buildings as appropriate, and build comprehensive networks of reliable charging stations that fit local circumstances.
In addition, local colleges should be deployed to advise businesses, landlords, and organizations on day-to-day carbon reduction strategies, including ways to optimize indoor temperature control, enhance recycling and reuse, upgrade lighting and appliances, and reduce business travel.
Again, this will require a strong federal financial commitment to state and local public colleges.
Priority: Resource and environmental management:
Governments also need to invest more heavily in a variety of important areas of natural resource management and remediation, including water supply preservation and expansion in drought-prone areas; flood prevention and damage mitigation in coastal and river basin areas; wetland protection and restoration; soil erosion mitigation, wild fire control; invasive species control; and toxic site clean-up. Mining needs technology upgrades to reduce environmental damage and agriculture needs to implement sustainable fertilizer and pest control techniques.
In addition, strategies will be needed to help key industries become more environmentally sustainable such as the cement, chemical/plastics, and metallurgy industries and those that contribute to deforestation and soil erosion.
In some cases, significant construction may be necessary if harbors and flood walls need to be rebuilt or strengthened, or housing moved inland, for example. In other cases, something approximating FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps can be established to help restore and conserve resources while providing jobs for younger workers, especially in rural areas.
Public colleges will be needed to design these solutions and provide appropriate training.
Other priorities:
There are other areas of public concern where public research universities and local colleges should be playing a significant role. The pandemic has exposed major weaknesses in public health systems, for example, including infectious disease surveillance, vaccine and protective equipment production and distribution, and safe staffing standards.
The caring economy also needs to be seriously improved. Aging populations are exposing shortfalls in meeting the needs of older adults with disabilities and chronic conditions. There are shortages of nurses, trained direct care workers, and geriatric social workers and psychologists, and too many older adults lack essential computer and telecom skills, increasing loneliness and making it difficult to carry out basic instrumental activities like banking and shopping.
Rural communities suffer shortages in dentists and dental technicians, substance abuse counselors and facilities, and primary care practitioners. Trained child care and pre-K workers are also desperately needed to support families where two earners are an economic necessity.
These are all areas where public higher education can play important research, design, training, staffing, and coordinating roles.
Conclusion
Industrialization has brought prosperity but has also created significant environmental and social problems. Science and technology created the foundation for industrial progress and prosperity, but it must be mobilized to solve the problems.
To this end, social democrats must renew their historical belief that while private enterprise is a vital source of innovation and technological progress, it is ultimately the responsibility of democratic governance to invest in people, and for the longer term. In this regard, a primary responsibility of government is to support research and development and provide new generations with necessary knowledge and skills.
Public higher education will need to play a central role.